Discriminative reranking is one method for constructing high-performance statistical parsers (Collins, 2000). A discriminative reranker requires a source of candidate parses for each sentence. This paper describes a simple yet novel method for constructing sets of 50-best parses based on a coarse-to-fine generative parser (Charniak, 2000). This method generates 50-best lists that are of substantially higher quality than previously obtainable.

We present a statistical machine translation model that uses hierarchical phrases—phrases that contain subphrases. The model is formally a synchronous context-free grammar but is learned from a parallel text without any syntactic annotations. Thus it can be seen as combining fundamental ideas from both syntax-based translation and phrase-based translation. We describe our system’s training and decoding methods in detail, and evaluate it for translation speed and translation accuracy. Using BLEU as a metric of translation accuracy, we find that our system performs significantly better than the Alignment Template System, a state-of-the-art phrasebased system. 1.

We present an effective training algorithm for linearly-scored dependency parsers that implements online largemargin multi-class training (Crammer and Singer, 2003; Crammer et al., 2003) on top of efficient parsing techniques for dependency trees (Eisner, 1996). The trained parsers achieve a competitive dependency accuracy for both English and Czech with no language specific enhancements. 1

In this paper, we propose a novel string-todependency algorithm for statistical machine translation. With this new framework, we employ a target dependency language model during decoding to exploit long distance word relations, which are unavailable with a traditional n-gram language model. Our experiments show that the string-to-dependency decoder achieves 1.48 point improvement in BLEU and 2.53 point improvement in TER compared to a standard hierarchical string-tostring system on the NIST 04 Chinese-English evaluation set. 1

We present a simple, but surprisingly effective, method of self-training a twophase parser-reranker system using readily available unlabeled data. We show that this type of bootstrapping is possible for parsing when the bootstrapped parses are processed by a discriminative reranker. Our improved model achieves an f-score of 92.1%, an absolute 1.1 % improvement (12 % error reduction) over the previous best result for Wall Street Journal parsing. Finally, we provide some analysis to better understand the phenomenon. 1

A syntax-directed translator first parses the source-language input into a parsetree, and then recursively converts the tree into a string in the target-language. We model this conversion by an extended treeto-string transducer that have multi-level trees on the source-side, which gives our system more expressive power and flexibility. We also define a direct probability model and use a linear-time dynamic programming algorithm to search for the best derivation. The model is then extended to the general log-linear framework in order to rescore with other features like n-gram language models. We devise a simple-yet-effective algorithm to generate non-duplicate k-best translations for n-gram rescoring. Initial experimental results on English-to-Chinese translation are presented. 1

Among syntax-based translation models, the tree-based approach, which takes as input a parse tree of the source sentence, is a promising direction being faster and simpler than its string-based counterpart. However, current tree-based systems suffer from a major drawback: they only use the 1-best parse to direct the translation, which potentially introduces translation mistakes due to parsing errors. We propose a forest-based approach that translates a packed forest of exponentially many parses, which encodes many more alternatives than standard n-best lists. Large-scale experiments show an absolute improvement of 1.7 BLEU points over the 1-best baseline. This result is also 0.8 points higher than decoding with 30-best parses, and takes even less time. 1

Statistical machine translation (SMT) treats the translation of natural language as a machine learning problem. By examining many samples of human-produced translation, SMT algorithms automatically learn how to translate. SMT has made tremendous strides in less than two decades, and many popular techniques have only emerged within the last few years. This survey presents a tutorial overview of state-of-the-art SMT at the beginning of 2007. We begin with the context of the current research, and then move to a formal problem description and an overview of the four main subproblems: translational equivalence modeling, mathematical modeling, parameter estimation, and decoding. Along the way, we present a taxonomy of some different approaches within these areas. We conclude with an overview of evaluation and notes on future directions.

Efficient decoding has been a fundamental problem in machine translation, especially with an integrated language model which is essential for achieving good translation quality. We develop faster approaches for this problem based on k-best parsing algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness on both phrase-based and syntax-based MT systems. In both cases, our methods achieve significant speed improvements, often by more than a factor of ten, over the conventional beam-search method at the same levels of search error and translation accuracy. 1

We propose a novel reordering model for phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) that uses a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model to predicate reorderings of neighbor blocks (phrase pairs). The model provides content-dependent, hierarchical phrasal reordering with generalization based on features automatically learned from a real-world bitext. We present an algorithm to extract all reordering events of neighbor blocks from bilingual data. In our experiments on Chineseto-English translation, this MaxEnt-based reordering model obtains significant improvements in BLEU score on the NIST MT-05 and IWSLT-04 tasks. 1